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Comment by caturopath | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Sundar Pichai hasn't been replaced. Google seems like it's been floundering with respect to its ability to innovate and execute in the past decade. To the extent that this Google has been a good maintenance org for their cash cows, even that might not be a good plan if they dropped the ball with AI.

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Perhaps you need to first define "innovation" and maybe also rationalize why that view of innovation is the end-all of determining CEO performance. Otherwise you're begging the question here.

Google's stock performance, revenue growth, and political influence in Washington under his leadership has grown substantially. I don't disagree that there are even better CEO's out there, but as an investor, the framing of your question is way off. Given the financial performance, why would you want to replace him?

I didn't say that innovation was the end-all of determining CEO performance, though producing new products and creating new markets is the angle that tech tends to go for. I mentioned Google's struggles to execute: they have an astoundingly hard time getting shit done compared to the other largest tech companies.

The counterfactual isn't Google having average performance. You're crediting the stock performance, revenue growth, and political influence (don't really agree this last one was a place Google shined over this period) to Sundar's leadership; I think it has a lot more to do with the company he was handed.

Answer is simple: he keeps cash coming in and stock price rising. You can compare his performance to his predecessors and CEOs at other companies. That does not necessarily make him a "good" leader in your eyes, but good enough to the board.

Everybody’s thinking the same thing. He sucks.

Google is the leader in LLMs and self-driving cars, two of the biggest innovation areas in the last decade, so how exactly has it been floundering in its ability to innovate and execute?

Google isn't "the leader" in LLMs. Despite a huge funnel to get users in, for intentional use they are a distant second place for consumers, fourth place for LLM APIs, and reputationally treated as an underdog to two tiny companies.

googles worth 2 trillion dollars off the back of a website. I think investors are so out of their depth with tech that theyre cool with his mediocre performance

Two websites and an ad business.

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